The Fine Arts Gallery presents an exhibition “Contingent Objects: works by Nina Katchadourian and Annette Lawrence” which celebrates the centennial of Marcel Duchamp’s landmark artwork “Bottle Rack”, 1914. By recontextualizing found objects, these two artists’ works make reference to the challenging ideas inherent in Duchamp’s oeuvre.

Nina Katchadourian’s “Family Gatherings” is a suite of photographs of book groupings from a family’s personal library. After studying the character of the library collection, Katchadourian arranged selected books in horizontal stacks so their titles form clever sentences or ideas not necessarily related to the books’ contents. Katchadourian’s work uses humor to reveal serious contemporaneous issues.

Annette Lawrence exhibits twelve dramatic wall sculptures titled “Free Paper”, which she constructed from catalogs received in her mail. Working from her career-long engagement with art as idea, Lawrence dissects and displays the catalogs in stacks on shelves, with each sculpture presenting that month’s collection. The sculptures illuminate many topics both intellectual and social, including environmental and commercial mass marketing problems.